1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a substrate cleaning tool and a substrate cleaning apparatus for cleaning a substrate, for example, semiconductor wafer, LCD substrate glass, etc.
2. Description of the Related Art
The manufacturing process for semiconductor devices requires maintaining the cleanilyness of semiconductor wafers on which the semiconductor devices are built. Note, the semiconductor wafers will be shortened to “wafers”, hereinafter. Accordingly, before and after respective manufacturing and application processes and also after film deposition and polishing processes, the wafers are cleaned by the substrate cleaning apparatus.
In the above substrate cleaning apparatus, generally, a brush is pressed on the wafer in their relative movement to remove particle contaminants off the wafer. Hitherto, there has been employed a combination-type brush composed of brush elements of PVD (polyvinyl alcohol) and rigid nylon hairs. In operation, for example, the whole wafer is cleaned uniformly by reciprocating the brush between the center of the rotating wafer and the periphery.
In the conventional substrate cleaning apparatus, however, there still remains a possibility that the particles are left on the wafer after cleaning process since the particles, such as particle contaminants, are easy to adhere to the brush and therefore transferred to the wafer. To the contrary, the removal of particles transferred as above requires frequent cleaning of the brush to take a long time for cleaning process. Consequently, the elongated cleaning period causes the brush to be deteriorated with troublesome maintenance due to replacement of the brush, etc.